Why you’re losing the battle of the sexes

The number of women attending the gym has shot up in recent years and they're almost certainly out-shining us guys. What's more, a recent study by University of Waterloo in Canada is backing this up. The study had nine men and nine women - all 18-30, fit and of a similar BMI - walk at varying speeds and gradients on a treadmill while their breathing was monitored.

The labcoats found that, though men were statistically faster and stronger, women adapted more quickly to changes in speed and thus, according to this study, are fitter. Are we losing the battle of the sexes? MH investigated.

You’ve seen her in the gym. Headphones in, moving from station to bench, focus fixed. While you recover from those leg raises, she’s on her third set of weighted dips. While you queue for a bench, she’s mastering the muscle-up. And the squat rack? Forget it. She’s busy repping out cleans like a pro.

Sure, the weights are lighter, but the form is on point. She’s one of a burgeoning flock. In gyms across the country, women are lifting, squatting and mobilising. They’re the new wave of fitness enthusiasts, building better bodies through dedicated resistance regimes – and looking good in Lululemon while they’re at it.

It’s a trend driving a female training revolution. For the first time, the number of women attending their first gym session is higher than that of men, driving the UK’s £4.3 billion fitness industry through a 13% growth since 2011.

Fad diets and punishing pre-holiday cardio bursts have been jettisoned in favour of sustainable strength and nutrition plans, which have been popularised by winsome celebrities as likely to update social media with shots of themselves sweating it out as they are their latest night out.

For the first time, hardcore fitness – lifting weights and eating clean – has hit the mainstream. And it’s not just about women cottoning on to the fact that resistance training is going to have a more positive effect on their thighs than a complicated relationship with the South Beach diet.

Rather, the focus is on – to borrow a buzz phrase – becoming strong, not skinny. “Social media has impacted what women really want now,” says Elaine Denton, a group health and fitness support manager at David Lloyd gyms.

“Girls see a ‘strong’ or ‘fit’ body as the ideal and are progressing towards weight training as a result.” Lee Matthews, UK fitness director at Fitness First, agrees the focus is shifting.

Scarlett, a student at Southampton University, is one of the women who have made the switch. “When I first started using the gym I thought becoming healthier and fitter meant losing weight, so I was cautious when my trainer started doing resistance work with me.

Now I’m firmly against losing weight per se, and understand that getting stronger doesn’t necessarily mean getting bigger. I want to tone up and build muscle. And I love the fact that I can recognise how strong I’m becoming.”

Scaling Up

If you’ve turned on a television in the past 12 months you’ll have probably seen a pair of almost identical adverts. Both feature women setting foot in the gym for the first time. Both acknowledge the apprehension this entails. Both want women to get active, and have a tweetable slogan to prove it.

The first, Sport England’s ‘This Girl Can’ campaign, launched last January, aimed at the two million UK women found to be engaging in less exercise than their male counterparts.

As Lisa O’Keefe, director of insight at Sport England, explains, the campaign was aimed at motivating “women in the very earliest stages of thinking about physical activity”. And it’s worked, with more than 2.8 million women aged 14-40 reportedly committing to getting active.

The second video is part of Nike’s ongoing ‘Better For It’ campaign. It’s a slicker aff air, but the essence remains the same. According to Nike, “It’s about leaving your comfort zone and knowing that you’ll be better off on the other side.” Since launching in April 2015, it has had more than eight million YouTube views.

The campaign’s success is bolstered by a number of female-centric training initiatives. Encouraging women to lace up and hit the mats, Nike+ Training Club – which existed for four years as women-only before inviting men to join in this year – features over 135 video workouts to follow and has logged 19 million downloads since 2012.

The app serves as a springboard for a roster of events engaging women in fi tness across the world. Last year’s Nike Women’s Race Series saw 200,000 women in 25 cities participating in everything from 5Ks to half marathons. This year’s NikeWomen Victory Tour combines races and athlete-led training classes, calling at 20 cities from Jakarta to LA.

Nike isn’t the only sportswear brand cashing in on the trend. Adidas launched its #workit campaign in 2015, partnering with Stella McCartney to design an athleisure range that looks the part, whether you’re on the way to a HIIT session or lunch with friends.

And while what women wear to the gym might be of as much interest to you as what happens at the end of The Notebook, women (like you) want to look good while they work out. And if this means buying something modelled by a member of the Skinny Bitch Collective, then so be it.

Ten years ago professional models might have got by on a bottle of Stoli and two packs of Marlboro Lights a day. Today they’re spearheading the move toward eating clean and toning through strengthening exercises. And it’s the Skinny Bitch Collective that taught them how to do it.

Beloved of high-profile clients such as Suki Waterhouse, Millie ‘primal’ movements. It’s not uncommon to find supermodels clambering across the floor or smacking each other on the behind in constantly evolving HIIT routines.

“It’s a great bonding technique,” Bateman says of the bum slaps. It also looks great on Instagram, where SBC has more than 90,000 followers.

Unusually for a fitness feed, Bateman’s team also posts shots of cakes and witticisms like, “Relationship status: made dinner for two and ate it all.”

At first glance posts like these might seem counter to the SBC ethos, but they’re a savvy marketing technique, appealing to the young Instagram and Tumblrobsessives who know they probably should do more exercise but just need that extra bit of ‘fitspiration’.

Persuading the world’s most image conscious women to appear on the internet in their workout gear also speaks to Bateman’s audience, with videos of Millie Mackintosh gritting her teeth through a plank proving that even Mackintosh and Daisy Lowe, SBC is an invite only class with bases in London, Ibiza, LA and New York, plus the occasional pop-up in-between.

At present, founder Russell Bateman runs three 50-minute classes a week, and has women signed up across the world. Classes aren’t about weightloss, but drawing attention to what good genetics have already bestowed.

“There’s nothing interesting for me about making someone who’s overweight a little bit less overweight,” says Bateman. “The challenge is getting someone who already looks great into epic shape.”

Cast somewhere between mysterious fitness messiah and the Derek Zoolander of personal training, this sensei of the skinny bitches has become a media favourite, dropping lines like “Always be your own guinea pig”, “Girls can look like panthers if they’re getting the techniques right” and “I love how the right enzymes can make you feel super human”.

This left-field approach extends to SBC classes, with Bateman – whose own routine consists of “crawling, deadlifts, squats, jumps, pushing, pulling and lots of yoga” – focusing on routines made up of well-groomed socialites sweat.

“SBC is the hardest workout I have ever attempted,” says Zara Martin, model, DJ and rear-slapping advocate. “The culture is great. We meet up regularly for breakfast or supper clubs. It’s so supportive.”

A video posted by THE SKINNY BITCH COLLECTIVE (@russellsbc) on Jul 5, 2016 at 10:15am PDT

And if the idea of a model supper club is intriguing, the rumours of high-profile attendees being denied a return visit for displaying a “bad attitude”, and the fact that Bateman advocates plenty of sex, also add to the mystique. “From experience, a girl is happier if she has come in the morning,” he says. Well, quite.

“ModelFit is a beautiful experience of wellness, not a gym,” says co-founder Vanessa Packer. “Health has shifted to a lifestyle-based experience. Not only are you working out, but you’re also living it through your daily routines.”

Of course, it’s one thing spending all day sipping kombucha and nailing core stability moves when your job is looking good in very little, but for women working nine to five, committing to a strict regime can be more difficult.

Offering a range of classes from ‘80s aerobics’ and ‘ski fit’ to one-off Craig David workshops, Frame is a London-based collection of studios combining the zeitgeist appeal of its high-end competitors with an urge to make fitness fun.

“We were jealous of guys standing around discussing last night’s five-a-side,” co-founder Pip Black says. “We craved a way of moving that could easily fit into your day, that you could do with friends, and that you didn’t have to commit to doing for X weeks into the future.”

Started by Black and co-founder Joan Murphy in 2009, Frame has grown from one studio with 15 trainers to four locations with more than 200 staff on hand to help process the 30,000 monthly bookings. With 80 classes a day at around £12 each, the gym proves fitness doesn’t have to be deadly serious to be profitable.

And while the class menu is definitely more female-friendly, men are welcome – although Murphy cautions that it might be one of the more taxing classes you take.

“Women generally excel in flexibility, musical co-ordination and muscular endurance,” she says, “whereas men find the more controlled movements in things like yoga more difficult.”

Different Strokes

Predictably, this is where things get contentious. Anecdotally speaking, many members of the MH team have attended female-focused classes – barre, spin, reformer Pilates – and been humbled.

Yet experts don’t necessarily subscribe to a levelling of the playing field. According to Mike Trenell, professor of metabolism and lifestyle medicine at Newcastle University, when it comes to fitness, women are at an evolutionary disadvantage. “As men we’re designed to be far more physical than women.

“Men have higher testosterone to drive muscle growth, making us bigger in terms of height, weight, lung capacity and mitochondrial density. That’s just ingrained in our physiology.”

Maybe so. But this perhaps misses a more holistic point. From a cultural evolutionary view, women are blazing a trail. Some 35 years ago, fitness trends were still heavily gendered. Men trained to look like Arnie; women kept fit with Jane Fonda.

Today, while men still make up 51% of a gym’s client base (at David Lloyd’s last count), outside of the odd experimental class, men are likely to stick to what we know: mostly lifting, a little cardio, then some more lifting.

This is where we are being left behind. The female fitness sector – or ‘Fitness 2.0’ – has the exact opposite approach.

As per any growing industry, it is constantly evolving, with a plethora of specialised apps, facilities and classes designed to get women working hard and in different ways.

This culture shift has, in turn, led to gyms and exercise classes becoming the new social hubs, where women train with friends in place of catching up over coffee or cocktails.

Women’s fitness has gathered momentum because a visit to the gym has become about more than simply putting in the hard yards and paying your dues. It is a way of developing social connections with colleagues and contemporaries. It is a way of bonding together through sweating together.

And with the Instagram accounts of Frame, ModelFit and SBC contributing to a new visual language around fitness that’s by turns competitive and supportive, social media is also becoming an increasingly important tool.

While the morale-boosting effects of logging your workout progress on Instagram are yet to be studied, the benefits of training with a partner have been well publicised.

A study by Stanford University found that something as simple as receiving a phone call from your training partner once every two weeks boosts productivity by 78%.

Considering that at any one time women who train are potentially linked to a millions-strong community of like-minded people via Instagram and apps such as Nike+ Training Club, it’s clear that men too could benefit from being more social when it comes to working out.

How to lift like a girl

Perhaps the greatest victory of the female fitness movement is the acceptance of the idea that obsessing over weight is counterproductive. “The message is finally getting through that weight loss isn’t a key indicator of progress or results,” says Denton.

“These days, women are learning that metabolic age and body composition are far more important where exercise is concerned.”

What’s important, then, isn’t simply that women are lifting, but how they’re lifting. With an emphasis on compound movements and small equipment training, women are getting to grips with a whole range of innovative ways to develop muscle for the long term, rather than inheriting men’s hang-ups about biceps size and T-shirt-filling workouts.

Dr Ken van Someren, a former world championship kayaker now working with the GSK Human Performance Lab, believes this emphasis on functional rather than aesthetic strength is something both sexes must embrace to safeguard health.

“Men and women start losing muscle mass at a fairly significant rate from our mid-thirties onwards,” he says. “As a species, we’re also living longer, meaning that if we haven’t built and maintained muscle from an early age, the point when we won’t be able to walk up stairs or do the gardening will come sooner.

For both sexes, it’s vital that we start building muscle now.” For men, taking cues from our female counterparts and adapting our workouts to focus on increased workout variety, compound movements over mirror muscles and setting training goals with friends might not be a bad place to start. And let’s be honest – they’re all changes we already know we should be making.

That’s not to say we should scrap our current routines entirely. Rather, as the female fitness industry continues to evolve, we should learn from it and utilise the best of both worlds to maximise results.

“Men and women are different,” says Trenell. “We should acknowledge that and optimise what we have ourselves.”

Russ Harris, Six3Nine’s senior trainer and head of education, agrees. “Comparing men with women when it comes to assessing strengths and weaknesses is a futile task. Women are not weaker or smaller versions of men – they’re women.”

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